I’m under the cosh of an impending deadline at work right now so I’ll have to leave you these for your brains to chew on for a bit. Two old BBC films with the creepy atmosphere that 70s telly did so well featuring the great JG Ballard talking about the eroticism of cars and car crashes. Even if you think he’s talking a lot of silly bollocks (I’ve been in a car crash and believe me there wasn’t anything sexy about it) there’s still lots to enjoy: Sweeney-esque cars, the Westway, and Gabrielle Drake getting saucy with a gearstick.
A little tribute to J.D. Salinger. For more on the Catcher In The Rye-indie pop nexus read this.
“I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
“You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.”
“Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”
“He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God, I hate that stuff.”
“You ought to go to a boy’s school sometimes. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses.”
“Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.”
Download: A Sad Lament – Orange Juice (mp3) (I’m cheating a little, this is actually the version on the “Texas Fever” album)
One of the inspirations for this blog was the book “Lost Worlds” by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I’m going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he’s a much better writer than me.
“Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan’s response to the slenderest of pleasures was: ‘How lovely!’ She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness. Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her.” Michael Bywater, Lost Worlds (2004)
I was born in 1962 so the “Aunt Joan” in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth’s and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.
“The night was glorious, out there. The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping nosily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury Avenue canals like gondolas. Everyone had loot to spend, everyone had a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken hearts, because they were all ripe for the easy summer evening. The rubber plants in the espressos had been dusted, and the smooth white lights of the new-style Chinese restaurants — not the old Mah Jongg categories, but the latest thing with broad glass fronts, and Dacron curtainings, and a beige carpet over the interiors — were shining a dazzle, like some monster telly screens. Even those horrible old Anglo-Saxon public houses — all potato crisps and flat, stale ales, and puddles on the counter bar, and spittle — looked quite alluring, provided you didn’t push those two-ton doors that pinch your arse, and wander in. In fact, the capital was a night horse dream. And I thought, ‘My Lord, one thing is certain, and that’s that they’ll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.’” Colin MacInnes “Absolute Beginners” (1959)
And make a musical out of it they did, though sadly it was a real stinker, unlike the novel which is still wonderful and stylishly captures London coming out of it’s drab post-war cocoon and becoming the young, hip, and multicultural city that it is today.
Anyone who’s ever been young and hit the town on a Saturday night with money in their pocket and wearing their sharpest clothes knows the feeling he’s talking about above. Those glorious moments when you feel like you’re at the centre of the universe and there’s nowhere else in the world to be at that moment: The city, the lights, the people, the music, the clubs, the buzz — you just drink it all up. For me it was London in the 80s and early 90s, stepping out of Leicester Square tube station with my mates, heading into Chinatown for a few drinks at the Dive Bar, then off to a nightclub for hours of dancing to fantastic music and flirting with beautiful girls (very occasionally getting somewhere with one), then maybe a late night coffee at Bar Italia or more drinks at one of the after-hours bars on Hanway Street before catching the Night Bus from Trafalgar Square (and eating one of the nasty, greasy hamburgers the street vendors sold there while waiting), sometimes not getting home until the sun was coming up. Even with a skinful of booze inside me I never felt more alive.
Now, of course, I’m an old geezer who flakes out after a few drinks at 11pm. But back then, well, to quote William Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!
The film might have been a load of rubbish but it did give us the best record David Bowie made in the 1980s (post-”Scary Monsters” anyway). This is the mega-long, 8-minute version.
“Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going round and round. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going round and round, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.” J. D. Salinger The Catcher In The Rye (1951)
I don’t remember how old I was when I first read “The Catcher In The Rye” (I still have my old Penguin Modern Classics copy which cost 30p) but I was the type who identified with Holden Caulfield and still am in a lot of ways. Holden was a clever, sarcastic kid who wasn’t very good at games and was prematurely cynical about the world but had a sentimental streak a mile wide. He was a teen rebel but not in any wild, Jack Kerouac, James Dean, living-on-the-edge, rock and roll sort of way. He loved childish innocence and just wanted adults to be honest and nice which makes him more of an indie-pop sort of rebel, the patron saint of quiet boys who start fanzines in their bedrooms, make mixtapes for pretty girls, or form cute indie bands. Orange Juice made his influence apparent when they put out records on a label called “Holden Caulfield Universal” but if they were to make a movie of the novel I’d nominate The Pale Fountains to supply the soundtrack. Edwyn Collins had Holden’s sardonic humour but Fountains’ lead singer Michael Head captured his wistful yearning and fragile sensibility.
In my movie version of “Catcher In The Rye” I can imagine The Fountains’ lovely second single “Thank You” bursting out like fireworks over the climactic scene with Holden’s little sister spinning around on the carousel while he breaks down in tears at the transcendent beauty of it all. With it’s soaring crescendos of strings there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.
By the time their debut album “Pacific Street” finally emerged in 1984 they had competition from new bands like the even more bookish and precious Prefab Sprout (who wrote songs based on Graham Greene novels). Flop though it was, the album did produce their best ever moment in the majestic single “(Don’t Let Your Love) Start A War” (which was called “You’ll Start A War” on the album). This is the extended 12″ version which is even more epic and not available on CD anywhere far as I know.
Bonus feature: I saw The Fountains live supporting Orange Juice (God, I wish you could’ve been there) when their second album “From Across the Kitchen Table” came out. As you can see from this video for the single “Jean’s Not Happening” by then the group were into leather jackets, ripped jeans, and motorbikes, but even with loud guitars they still sounded like nice boys.
“The lower middle class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras – they lived by the money code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had kept their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’ – kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.” George Orwell Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The Aspidistra plant was a ubiquitous prescence in English homes from the Victorian era through to WWII, it’s popularity mostly due to it being impossible to kill no matter how much you neglected it and able to practically grow in the dark which made it perfect for drab and pokey English sitting rooms. In Orwell’s novel it symbolizes dull bourgeois taste and the “parlour palm” was so pervasive it became an emblem of aspiring middle class respectability, bringing a touch of colour to otherwise humdrum lives. Like the flamboyant spider plant in the bohemian 70s and the angular Yucca in the designer 80s, the Aspidistra meant something more than mere home decoration – it’s the plant for people who “know their place.”
Cementing it’s position as a national icon, the plant was also the subject of the very popular 1920s song “The Biggest Aspidistra In The World” by Lancashire lass Gracie Fields. Gracie was born over a chip shop in Rochdale which sounds like the sort of thing Monty Python would make up for some comically working class character (but it’s true) and went on to become the most famous and highest-paid entertainer in England, if they’d had pop charts back then I would have called this a monster hit. This is a very funny song about the jolly japes that result from the plant being crossed with an oak tree – so it’s also a warning of the dangers of genetic engineering. Though the references to Hitler and Goering must mean this isn’t the original version, but you can’t beat a song that takes the piss out of Adolf too.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
